Any time spent with Grafton’s inimitable shamus is one of the highlights of the year, but her 25th case drags on forever...
The release of a 24-year-old who’s aged out of his juvenile conviction for murdering one of his schoolmates reopens old wounds for everyone concerned and brings Santa Teresa private eye Kinsey Millhone (X, 2015, etc.) to the case.
Even though Fritz McCabe was the one who did the time for killing Sloan Stevens, her death seems to have been the fault of nobody and everybody. Frozen out by her classmates at posh Climping Academy after reportedly exposing Iris Lehmann’s scheme to pass high-stakes test answers to Poppy Earl and Troy Rademaker, Sloan was shot 10 years ago while running away from Troy, who together with Fritz, Austin Brown, and Bayard Montgomery, had driven her out to the Yellowweed camping ground. Fritz’s parents, Lauren and Hollis McCabe, have welcomed him home, but they’re distinctly less happy to have received a copy of a sex tape several members of this crowd made shortly before Sloan’s death, along with a note demanding $25,000 for its destruction. Lauren, fearing the theft of the original tape may have provided a motive for Sloan’s murder, wants Kinsey to get to the bottom of the mystery—until she doesn’t, firing her for calling the kids-turned-adults liars when they claim the tape was nothing but a mockumentary lark. Kinsey’s just as pleased to be free of the case: Lauren McCabe’s been anything but a model client, and Kinsey already has to deal with the unrelated threat of Ned Lowe, a serial killer on the lam who’s set his sights on her. But her respite from both the Yellowweed shooting and her own stalker is all too brief, and soon a present-day murder and the threat of even more violence force her back to both cases.
Any time spent with Grafton’s inimitable shamus is one of the highlights of the year, but her 25th case drags on forever before ending with a whimper. Fans won’t mind as they cheer the series on to Z Is for Zany, or whatever the endlessly resourceful author has in mind.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-16385-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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